


The Point of the Blade

by Island_of_Reil



Category: The Eagle | The Eagle of the Ninth (2011)
Genre: Cutting Clothes Off, Dominance, Dubious Consent, Hurt/Comfort, Knifeplay, M/M, Slavery, Submission, Subspace, Verbal Humiliation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-02
Updated: 2014-01-02
Packaged: 2018-01-07 04:22:30
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,209
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1115452
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Island_of_Reil/pseuds/Island_of_Reil
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This fic was inspired by Wagnetic's <a href="http://archiveofourown.org/works/984341">"Once,"</a> in which Marcus and Esca stay much longer with the Seal People than they did in canon, and Marcus descends into an unhealthy sort of subspace. In this fic, Esca remains loyal to Marcus... but is not gentle with him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Point of the Blade

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Once](https://archiveofourown.org/works/984341) by [Wagnetic](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Wagnetic/pseuds/Wagnetic). 



When Marcus awakes, he is not sure where he is. For the first time in months, warm bodies do not surround him. But he is no longer deathly cold.

He raises his head, weakly, and looks around. He seems to be in a small tent. He lies on a pallet, wrapped in an old and ragged but thick woolen cloak. About a foot away on a second pallet lies another person, fast asleep. He squints in the dim light that passes cloudily through the skins that make up the tent.

It is the old woman, the one whose kindness has sustained him through all these wretched months. Between them is a long, narrow, flat stone with a cup set upon it. A bitter scent emanates from the cup. He remembers the same bitterness in his mouth during dreams. Or, perhaps, between dreams.

He opens his mouth to speak. His voice rasps in his throat. _I am become a seal myself,_ it occurs to him, and he is not sure whether the thought is amusing, terrifying, or just a matter of fact.

 _“A Mhàthair,”_ he croaks. It is what all the other slaves call her. He has had to learn some of the language by necessity, but nobody has ever had to tell him the meaning of her name. A piece of irony, to be mothered once again not only when he is a grown man but when he is a lowly slave.

She stirs, then lifts her head. Her eyes widen in the dim of the tent, and she leans across the stone and lays her withered hand on his cheek. She seldom speaks, but now she whispers, _“Tha thu beò,”_ a smile of amazement lighting her lined face. Then she throws back the old rag that serves her as a blanket, rises to her feet with a surprising alacrity for one of her age, and is gone from the tent.

Marcus lowers his head to his pallet again. He is no longer cold, but he is weak, and he is tired, despite having just awoken. His eyes close of their own accord. They open again, and close again, repeatedly as another period of time passes. The only thing to mark that time is the feel of a hand on his cheek, broader and stronger than Màthair’s, and burning against his own skin even though he is no longer cold.

*

When Màthair eventually returns, she carries a bowl of stew, a hunk of coarse bread, and another cup. The stew is seal, mostly broth but with chewy little bits of meat and seaweed, all of it imbued with the brisk salty smack of the ocean.

The dish of his servitude. He has always downed it with disgust and hatred when he has had the energy to spare for either. All other days he has borne the taste with resignation, that he might live. Now, he finds he is ravenous, and that gives the dish savor enough. Before long he is mopping up the last drops with the bread. The meat and broth seem to have returned to him some measure of the strength that the fever leached out of his bones.

Màthair has set the cup on the stone between them, and she is regarding him with an expectant smile. Its tepid contents emit a bitter scent, though not as bitter as those of the first cup. He understands he is expected to drink it. Even if he could argue with her fluently, he would not. He almost certainly owes his life to her simples. With a deferential duck of his head, he takes up the cup, drains it, and replaces it on the stone.

 _“Gun robh math agaibh, a Mhàthair,”_ he says, slowly and with effort. He is sure he has mangled each syllable, but her smile broadens, and she touches her hand to his face again before she rises and leaves once more.

He rests, slipping in and out of sleep like a fish through seaweed. 

At some point he feels a rough, wet cloth sliding over his bared skin. The alkaline smell of _sapo_ , which the tribes favor over oil and strigils, is in his nostrils. He does not remember anyone having pulled his tunic over his head or unlaced his braccae. 

He cracks an eye open and sees that it is Màthair who washes him. She does so assiduously and thoroughly, even parting his legs to wash the most intimate places of his body, as she might have her own infant son or grandson. He closes his eye again. 

Eventually a dry cloth replaces the damp one. Before long Màthair ceases to pass it over him as well. He feels her hand slide under the small of his back, and he obediently sits up. She eases a tunic over his head, and he lifts his arms and works them into the long sleeves. It is an old and worn tunic, as befits his station, but it is clean. 

Then she holds out a pair of long braccae, also worn but clean. He braces his palms on the pallet and rises. His legs are stiff, especially the wounded one. Unsurprising, when he considers how many days he must have spent flat on his back, but he is able to step into the braccae and tie the laces without much difficulty.

Suddenly the need to piss is upon him. He can’t remember having done so since he fell ill; he wonders if he has since soiled his old clothes or the pallet at all. He turns to Màthair, points to the tent flap, cups his hand in front of his groin. She nods in understanding.

He stuffs his feet into his battered _caligae_ , and then he pushes his way into the blindingly bright daylight. At first he must shield his eyes with his hand; when they have adjusted to the light, he sees that the tent in which he has been recuperating sits some distance apart from the main encampment. The wind off the sea cuts sharp. Shivering, he limps behind an outcropping of rock that provides a modicum of shelter, and there he empties his bladder.

Covering the short distance from the tent has left him tired anew. Though he does not miss his labors at all, he is frustrated and humiliated at how much strength the illness has stolen from him. He drags himself back to the tent without sparing a glance at a nearby pair of Seal warriors. They speak of him aloud, in his presence, as they would of any other possession. He hears the phrase _tràill Ròmanach_ , the name _mac Cunoval_ , an obscene and insinuating laugh. He has heard that combination before, many times.

When he returns to the tent, Màthair is gone, but there is yet another full cup on the stone. He sinks onto his pallet, drains the cup, wipes his mouth with the sleeve of his clean tunic, and pitches headlong back into oblivion.

*

He stirs again to the sound of the tent flap being pulled open, blinks in the flooding golden light cast by a seal-oil lantern. He is confused. Even at night, Màthair has never brought a lantern with her before.

His heart goes painfully still in his chest when he sees who has entered. Without thought, he sits up straight on his pallet, then slides off the side of it opposite the stone table, it into the dirt, where he gets his knees under him despite the throb in his bad thigh. And he hears a chuckle — no, not even that, the laugh is too soft, barely audible. But it worms into secret places within Marcus, where it kindles a shameful heat.

“Good. _Very_ good, Marcus. I needn’t even command you to kneel anymore.”

Esca is resplendent in braccae, boots, and a long cloak, all made of sealskin. His chest is bare, and a torc gleams golden against his throat in the lantern light. He is better fed now than Marcus has ever seen him — much better fed than Marcus has been since they came here — but he remains lithe and sinewy from spending his days hunting alongside and sparring with the Seal Prince and his companions. The sun has gilded the surface of his hair and the light growth of beard on his cheeks and chin; beneath the latter, his skin is wind ruddied.

Suddenly aware he is staring, Marcus drops his head. Esca does not speak or move for a long moment. Then Marcus hears the rustle of sealskin, hears his footfalls approach, before Esca stands still once more. Though it is a very soft sound, Marcus recognizes the muffled slide of a blade being loosed from a sheath.

Then Esca’s fist is in his hair, pulling his head up again. He gasps at the pain, a hotly intimate one. His body goes rigid and his eyes close as he feels the cold bladepoint against his throat. A scalding jolt of blood goes straight to his cock.

They are the only two in the encampment who speak or understand more than a few words of Latin. Yet when Esca next speaks, it is soft, very soft, and his pitch low, that his words barely carry to the edges of the tent’s interior, let alone outside it. Marcus understands. Esca’s words are for him, and for him alone.

“You like this much, much better than you let on.” The point of the blade travels across his throat in a wide arc. With only a bit more pressure, it would be a killing arc. “That’s why you threatened to kill me, Marcus. You were shamed not only to be on your knees before all of us — “ Marcus notes that he is not part of that _us_ — “with my hand in your hair. As it is now. You were even more shamed that the front of your braccae were as distended as ever I’ve seen them. As they are now.”

Marcus swallows, feeling the point skip lightly over the descending lump in his throat. He would not have guessed that Esca had seen. Esca had been standing behind him, towering over him for once, and he had spoken of Marcus to the Seal Prince just as the two warriors on the shore had: as if Marcus were of no more import than a chipped bowl that could be dashed against the rocks and forgotten.

As if reading his thoughts, Esca says, “Yes, I noticed. Had I actually put a knife to your throat then and there, you’d have spent in your braccae.” The last words are edged with contemptuous amusement. “Wouldn’t you have?”

Marcus says nothing. He is not sure if the question is rhetorical. If Esca wishes an answer, he will make it clear.

Evidently, Esca does not. With the same light touch, he draws the point of the blade upward, over the chinstrap scar — that ghostly evidence that Marcus was once something more than the slave and plaything of a barbarian — over Marcus’s chin, and then across his lips. It tickles there, and Marcus twitches. Then Esca’s wrist turns ever so slightly, and Marcus feels the sting of blood blossoming in the middle of his lower lip. He shudders deeply with an excitement that shames him; he wants to suck at the nicked spot, but he does not for fear it might displease Esca.

Esca’s wrist turns again, laying the blade flat against Marcus’s wounded lip. “Kiss your lover, Marcus.” Marcus obeys, and when the knife comes away from him, the stain of his own blood is dark against the gleam of the blade in the lamp light.

Another shadow of a chuckle. “When you were the master, Marcus, did you ever imagine that one day you’d gladly anoint my knife with your own blood for me?”

Still Marcus says nothing. He cannot lower his head, not with Esca holding him by the hair, but he trains his eyes on an indistinct spot in the dirt the breadth of a few thumbs beyond his knees.

Esca moves slightly closer, brushing the front of his braccae against Marcus’s mouth. They, too, are distended. Marcus does not flinch, even though the sealskin has touched the cut on his lip. He exhales a breath he didn’t realize he was holding, long and soft. Esca’s grip on his hair relaxes somewhat, and he feels fingertips lightly skimming his scalp. He is flooded with a warm, desperate gratitude.

“So well trained.” Esca’s voice is still soft and low; its cadence has become soothing, almost a croon. “So obedient.” The mockery returns, adding an edge to his voice. “Of course, Rome did that.”

Marcus goes stock-still again, and Esca gives another not-chuckle. “You don’t think of it that way, do you? When a Briton goes to war, he does so as a man, standing for the love of his kin and tribe and out of loyalty to his chieftain. When a Roman goes to war, he does so as an ant in a swarm. An impressively clad ant, to be sure, in a powerful swarm. But take him out of the swarm and he’s nothing left but his training, which he mistakes for ‘honor.’ Keep him out of the swarm long enough and you can crush his spirit between your fingertips.” He punctuates the word _crush_ by pinching hard into Marcus’s left earlobe with the fingers that had been in his hair. Marcus sucks in his breath hard but does not disgrace himself by crying out.

“ _Craosachd-Dhearg na Lugh,_ Marcus — Rome even trained you to mistrust your own desires.” Now Esca is softly caressing a spot where Marcus’s scalp meets his neck, and it is as if the nerves there are directly connected to those in his cock. “Have you never considered how monstrous that is? And how pointless, for a man to despise himself for wanting something as pleasurable and harmless as a cock in his arse? There’s not a British or Gaulish man, alive or dead, who never enjoyed that before. But no Roman could ever be so valiant or victorious that Rome would overlook it. Not even your Caesar — ‘every woman’s man and every man’s woman,’ they called him.”

Marcus is still Roman enough to understand at some level that he should be outraged to hear Rome slurred so by one who is, after all, only a barbarian. But there is no rage in him, not now. His world has narrowed to the soft stroking of Esca’s fingers against his neck. He thinks that if Esca commanded him to, he could spend just from that, right now, without Esca touching any other part of his body.

As if reading his mind, Esca continues. “Rome couldn’t break me in seven years, Marcus — and it wasn’t for lack of trying. I would have died first. You know, because you saw me try. But we haven’t been here seven months, and you would do anything I commanded, with not a whimper of protest.”

He feels Esca’s hand on his left shoulder. The touch is strangely impersonal. Then the cold blade lodges between his tunic and his shoulder, and he hears it rip through the coarse woolen weave.

“You will not need this tonight, Marcus. One of the slave women can teach you how to mend it later, I’m sure. If you don’t know how already.” Marcus’s face fills with hot blood. He realizes they are just words, that Esca has nothing but contempt for the _mores_ of Rome and is reaching for any lash he can put to Marcus’s back. But the lash stings just the same. Esca has more than once taken his _pudicitia_ from him already — why should Marcus not lend his hands to women’s work, after all?

Esca crouches. Slowly and carefully, the blade parts the tunic all the way down Marcus’s front, from shoulder to hem. Marcus remains absolutely still on his knees, except that his chest has begun to heave, the way Esca’s did in the arena at Calleva. 

Esca makes four more cuts, horizontal ones this time, in the front of Marcus’s tunic. Two on each side, one at breast level and the other at belly level, around to the sides of Marcus’s body. Then he stands, sheathes the knife, and moves behind Marcus. Without warning, he seizes the rough edges of the broad flaps he has just created and yanks them backward, baring Marcus from shoulders to waist, and trapping his still-clad arms behind him. With a few deft twists, he has Marcus bound.

“Much better.” Esca steps back around to face Marcus; he slides his fingertips down Marcus’s cheek and the underside of his chin, over the scar. “You may be an ant, Marcus, but you are a very pretty ant.” He crouches once again, and his hand passes down Marcus’s bare chest, stopping to dig nails into the closest nipple. Again, Marcus draws in a harsh breath but does not cry out.

Esca’s hand flattens again to slide down the hard ridges of Marcus’s belly. “And a very well-built ant, too.”

He is not surprised at all when Esca’s hand cups his rampant cock, still trapped in his braccae. But this time he cannot keep silent; he looses a deep, longing moan. Esca does not reply, but Marcus hears his breath quicken as he continues to palm the fierce bulge at the center of Marcus’s body.

“You won’t need the braccae tonight, either.” Esca’s voice is hoarsening. The knife is in his hand again — and the blade, cool through the wool of the braccae, flat against the swelling of Marcus’s cock. Marcus’s heart begins to pound, but he does not lose his cockstand. Quite the opposite: He grows harder than before.

Esca lifts the knife, moves it slightly backward, and then drags the point very, very gently, too gently to cut anything, over the bulge. Marcus’s panting breaths alternate with whimpers. He restrains himself from jerking his hips to thrust against the point. He is not _that_ far gone. Only…. close to it.

Then Esca has two fingers inside the waist of Marcus’s braccae, at the right hip, and the knife is slicing through the wool, passing over the mass of scars on Marcus’s broad, solid thigh, stopping where his knee rests in the dirt. A few seconds later, Esca rends the left side of the garment in the same way.

He pulls the front flap down, baring Marcus’s loins. His left hand reaches out and closes tightly around Marcus, who makes a sound that is part-groan, part-cry. The tip of his cock is slippery-wet, and Esca’s fingers spread the wetness over the broad smooth head, dipping down to moisten the sensitive spot on the underside.

This time, Marcus does lift his hips and thrust within Esca’s grip. And, suddenly, Esca’s hand is gone from around his cock, and both his hands are on Marcus’s chest, shoving him backwards. Marcus topples, landing painfully on the points of his elbows, but his whimper is purely one of thwarted desire.

Esca seizes him around the waist and flips him over in one effortless motion. “Get your knees under you and keep your head down,” he growls. Even after days of inactivity, with his arms bound awkwardly behind him and his war wound aching, Marcus is limber enough to obey, to lower his face to the dirt and thrust his buttocks into the air. Esca pulls the rear flap of the torn braccae down, and Marcus is completely exposed.

He hears Esca stand again. Mostly he hears Esca’s ragged breathing, raggeder than his own now. Rough hands encompass and squeeze his buttocks, stroking down the cleft and then the backs of his thighs, cupping and caressing his balls, then working their way upward again. He finds his hips working, pushing his arse backward into Esca’s grasp. He half-expects a slap or a pinch for his presumption, but neither happens.

Esca’s hands leave him for a moment. He hears a rustle, then the wet pop of a cork being pulled from a small vial. Seal oil, Marcus thinks. There is the gurgle of it being decanted, the sound of flesh being slickened. Then a dry hand rests at the small of his back, and an oiled finger is between his buttocks.

He groans. He fights the impulse to clench, to pull Esca’s entire hand into him, and instead slackens inside so that nothing impedes Esca’s finger. Soon it is working in and out of him with an oily sucking sound that is positively obscene. 

He hears Esca’s not-chuckle again, dry and ghostly. “ _Mi cineade Romane._ Do you know, the first time I ever saw you, the very first thing that occurred to me was how much I’d have liked to have you on your knees before me, naked? Even before I realized you’d taken my own death from me — the only thing I had left to claim as mine. Strange how one’s mind works in such a moment, isn’t it?”

A second fingertip brushes against his entrance, then slides in alongside the second. They begin to piston in and out of him in unison.

Esca first took Marcus not long after they had come to live amongst the Seal People. Though the prospect had made a hot, sickly anticipation burn deep down within him as if the river Phlegethon ran through his belly, Marcus was tight with inexperience and fear and shame. He had hoped Esca would just take him roughly and be finished with him, as he himself had done to any number of bed-slaves when he was the one called _domine_. It would be shameful, it would hurt, but it would be over quickly and, he had thought, he could bear it stoically.

That was not what happened. To be sure, Esca did not ask Marcus for his consent. But he very much took the time and the effort to awaken every nerve that Marcus had not known he’d had, to gloat over every resulting quiver or spasm or gasp of pleasure, to make sure Marcus was oiled and open enough that he could receive Esca with no pain, and — Marcus still reddened to think of it — to bring Marcus to the depths of abject, pleading desperation, resolved only when he shuddered and cried out and drenched Esca’s hand as Esca himself was spending inside him. 

Then Esca had withdrawn from Marcus’s body and risen from the pallet. As he dressed, he had offered up scorn-edged praise for what a splendid _pathicus_ he had acquired as a bed-slave. And there he had left Marcus, lying in a pool of his own seed with Esca’s trickling out of him — burning with shame, and with the desire that it would happen again, and with shame at feeling such desire.

That desire was granted, many times over. Sometimes Esca used his arse, sometimes his mouth. Sometimes he bound Marcus, sometimes not. Sometimes he struck Marcus across the face, hard enough to leave a mark, though not hard enough to injure him. Once, after binding Marcus’s ankles together and his wrists above his head, Esca even mounted and rode him, somehow remaining master though it was Marcus inside him and not the other way around. But always he treated Marcus with an admixture of force and gentleness, of contempt and tenderness, the mixture seemingly calculated as carefully as a _medicus_ mixes his salves. Or, perhaps, as carefully as a warrior seeks out and exploits the weaknesses of his enemy.

Now, in the healing tent, Esca continues to work his fingers in and out of Marcus. He is silent, other than that he continues to breathe heavily. Marcus becomes aware that his hips are moving in rhythm with Esca’s fingers, that he is fucking himself on them. He knows Esca is right: Marcus is a _cineadus_ , a _pathicus_ , a not-quite-man who lives for the shameful pleasure of being penetrated, of serving another man as a receptacle for his seed. His heroism at Isca Dumnoniorum, and in Judaea before that, can never salve it; in this, Esca was again right. If it was true of Caesar, why would it not be true of Marcus? Of an ant like Marcus?

Finally he hears Esca’s voice again, low and rough.

“Oh, you are ready for me, Marcus. Extremely ready. I could probably put my entire arm inside you now, up to the shoulder. And you’d take it, wouldn’t you? With pleasure, and with cries for more.” Marcus’s face burns hot against the dirt, but again, Esca has said nothing that is untrue.

There is more rustling, more of the sound of flesh being oiled. Then a calloused, ungentle hand grips Marcus by the left hip, while the other is between his buttocks again. Pressing against his entrance is something larger than any fingertip, and Marcus suppresses a whimper of urgency to have it do more than press.

Esca is, once more, correct. His first thrust into Marcus is nearly a glide, as easily done as if he were entering the most fucked-out of camp followers. “Ah,” he exhales, and Marcus pictures his features contracting with pleasure, his teeth in his own lower lip. His cock now in place, he shifts his right hand to Marcus’s right hip, and his body is a warm, hard weight against Marcus’s back and buttocks.

He does not speak for the first several thrusts. When his hips have found a rhythm and he is driving steadily in and out of Marcus, he pours forth a libation of obscenities in Latin and, Marcus knows without understanding the words themselves, in British. His voice comes in gasps, sometimes punctuated with a soft moan. With every thrust, more and more of the words are in British.

And with every thrust he hits the little spot inside Marcus that makes pleasure bloom inside him. Marcus is gasping and moaning himself, and his own hips have begun to move in rhythm with Esca’s. Esca’s only response is to sink his fingers more deeply into Marcus’s hips and drive harder and harder into him. 

And then, suddenly, one hand drops down to furl around Marcus’s cock, fingertips once again dipping into the slickness at its opening and sliding wetly all over the head and under its flared edge.

“Spend, Marcus,” Esca hisses in his ear. “This is what you want. What Rome wants. She won’t allow you to enjoy simply being fucked, like a healthy man does. You can’t find release unless you’re being bloodied and bound and degraded and used. So spend for your new master, _scultimidone_.”

The words sear through Marcus, driving his seed out of him. In a series of body-wracking shudders and with a broken groan he feels it course over Esca’s hand, his arse clutch hard at Esca’s cock. Emptied of lust, he trembles with exhaustion, held up only by Esca. And then he hears the now-familiar moan, feels the answering spasms and wetness deep inside — and then Esca withdraws and moves apart from him, and Marcus topples onto the floor on his left side.

He is still panting; he can hear Esca panting as well, and also the rustle of sealskin once again. He lies there, expecting to hear salacious parting words of scorn, but there are none: only footfalls, the sound of the tent-flap, and then silence.

The dirt is chill beneath his mostly bare flesh. Like the insect Esca calls him, he writhes and inches again toward the pallet and, despite his bad leg and his still-bound arms, manages to pull himself back onto it. With the toes of his left foot he finds the edge of the cloak and draws it as far upward as he can, over his hips, and then he burrows his left leg beneath it.

For a while, a long while, he lies there, immersed in languor and shame as if in a _calidarium_. He feels the need to piss again. Though he tells himself he is not so degraded, not yet, he eventually finds himself wondering whether he should just soil himself and the pallet. The latter is already somewhat sticky with both his and Esca’s seed, as well as a bit of dirt from the floor. But then the tent-flap rustles again.

He cranes his neck and sees Màthair enter once more, a cup in one hand and a bowl in the other. There is a sealskin bag slung over her bony shoulder. She sets the cup and bowl down on the stone, then the sack on her own pallet.

Then he feels her withered hand on his bound ones. There is, yet again, the sound of a blade being withdrawn from a scabbard. It slides gently through the flaps of tunic that bind him. He sucks in his breath as the blood rushes back into his hands, and he brings them before himself to chafe his own wrists. When he has enough sensation in them once again, he braces his palms against the pallet and levers himself upward, then reaches beneath the cloak and draws what remains of his braccae off his legs.

Màthair has pulled a fresh tunic and braccae from the sack and laid them on her pallet. In her hand now is a dry cloth, and she leans toward Marcus again. He flushes; he knows Esca must have sent her. But he lies back obediently for her, and she pulls the cloak down. Once more she cleanses him with as little judgment as if she were changing the swaddling-clothes of a babe.

When she has finished, he stands. She hands him tunic and braccae, and he dons both. Once again he points to the tent-flap with his other hand before his groin; once again she nods. This time he drapes the bed-cloak around his shoulders before leaving the tent, and this time he stands merely a few feet outside the entrance to piss. No one else is about on this cold night.

When he returns to the tent, he makes short work of the seal stew and chases it with the contents of the cup. This time, Màthair has brought him the common British drink made of fermented barley. It is bitter, though not as bitter as her simples. When he has emptied both bowl and cup, he smiles at her and says, once again, _“Gun robh math agaibh, a Mhàthair.”_

Her thin dry lips curve in the lined web of her face. She leans forward once more, touches his shoulder, and says, emphatically, _“Esca.”_

Marcus can feel his smile vanish and his gaze sharpen.

She repeats the name, along with a few words. He catches those for _me_ and _thee_ , and he thinks he hears one that means _tell_ or _repeat_. And then she pauses, and she utters one more word. A Latin word, a short and simple one. One that Esca must have trained her to say.

Marcus goes still for a moment. Then he nods, and her hand leaves his shoulder. She takes up the empty vessels and, with one more serene smile, leaves him once more. He pulls the cloak over himself completely and nestles into the pallet, staring into the darkness until sleep overtakes him. 

_“Mox,”_ Màthair said.

_Soon._

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to [Sineala](http://archiveofourown.org/users/Sineala/pseuds/Sineala) for looking this over.
> 
> Don't ask me why I'm using Scots Gaelic rather than Irish in this story. To the extent that anyone in Britannia in the early 2nd century CE spoke [q-Celtic instead of p-Celtic](http://www.educationscotland.gov.uk/scotlandshistory/caledonianspictsromans/celticlanguages/index.asp), the language had almost certainly not differentiated much yet from that which was spoken in Hibernia. But it wasn't likely that q-Celtic was being spoken widely on the eastern side of the Irish Sea anyway. Oh, movie canon.
> 
>  _Màthair:_ Mother  
>  _Tha thu beò:_ You are alive; you live  
>  _Gun robh math agaibh:_ Thank you  
>  _tràill Ròmanach:_ Roman slave  
>  _Craosachd-Dhearg na Lugh:_ (hypothetical) oath "Burning Spear of Lugh"  
>  _[Pudicitia](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pudicitia):_ Roman sexual virtue  
>  _[Cineadus](http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/cinaedus), [pathicus](http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/pathicus):_ Terms for a man who is sexually penetrated; also homophobic insults  
>  _[Scultimidonus](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homosexuality_in_ancient_Rome#Scultimidonus):_ Another such insult (literally, "he who bestows his asshole upon others"), a very rare one and probably anachronistic by this time  
>  _Mi cineade Romane sue:_ My own personal Roman catamite
> 
> Also, in case you were wondering, "piston" as either verb or noun is [not an anachronism](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_internal_combustion_engine#Timeline_of_development) for this story.


End file.
